


if you hurt me (that's okay, baby)

by shineyma



Series: you can keep me [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Divorce, Established Relationship, F/M, Grant Ward Isn't Hydra, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-06-30
Packaged: 2018-04-06 20:21:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4235307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shineyma/pseuds/shineyma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jemma excels at preparation, but there are some things that all the preparation in the world won't help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if you hurt me (that's okay, baby)

**Author's Note:**

> Funny story about this fic and the fic I posted yesterday. On Sunday, as I was getting close to finishing _break me like a promise (so casually cruel)_ \--a fic I've been working on for AGES--I was like, "Jeez, I've been especially awful to Jemma lately. I should write something happy!"
> 
> In final, conclusive proof that I have _no_ control over my own mind, this is the fic that resulted from that impulse. Spoiler alert: it's not happy at all.
> 
> Anyway, this fic kind of took over after that, and I couldn't stop writing until I finished. I couldn't post it yesterday because of reasons, but luckily I finished up _break me_ in time to post it. So you get fics two days in a row! Lucky you!
> 
> Title from Ed Sheeran's _Photograph_. Thanks for reading and, as always, please be gentle if you review!

Jemma excels at preparation.

It’s out of necessity, really. It’s too easy for her to lose words, to get caught up in excitement and enthusiasm and wander away from what she means to say and into something entirely different. In the lab, it’s useful—so many breakthroughs are made with an accidental turn of phrase—and among friends, it’s considered charming—Clint smiles and laughs and pretends to cower away from her when she inadvertently suggests castration as a solution for his inability to work amicably with Brock Rumlow—but when it’s important, when it _counts_ , she needs her words to do what she wants them to.

So she prepares.

She practices while Grant’s away. In the morning, after brushing her teeth, she stares into the mirror and mouths the words _I can’t do this any longer_. She can’t speak them aloud in the silence of their apartment; the one time she tries, she gets as far as “I can’t,” before she chokes. Somehow, voicing the words here, with the walls of their home the only listeners, feels absurdly like a betrayal.

So in the morning, she only mouths them.

Later, alone in the lab save Fitz, the hum of this machine or the whirl of that to drown out the noise, she practices actually speaking them.

“I can’t do this any longer,” she tells the centrifuge. “We’re only hurting each other.”

That’s as far as she gets. Fitz knows what she’s planning—has held her through several crying jags and accompanied her to Legal for the information packet that still remains, crumpled and guilty, at the bottom of her handbag—but she can’t let him hear the words that are meant for Grant alone. Even risking him hearing the first two sentences is a step too far, she feels.

Fitz _knows_ what she’s planning. This, too, feels like a betrayal.

There is a park within one of the Sandbox’s greenhouses, a little garden with benches and flowers and trees, and it is always deserted on weekday evenings. After dinner, she ventures out to it and sits on a bench and practices some more.

“I can’t do this any longer.” The _Quercus coccifera_ ruffles in the artificial breeze, a silent witness. “We’re only hurting each other. I know you don’t mean to, and I hope you know that I don’t mean to, either, but that’s what we’re doing.”

Three sentences. They’re good sentences, she thinks. Not accusatory, nor overly apologetic. Calm and rational and resolved.

She’s been practicing for nearly two weeks now, and all she’s managed is three sentences. She doesn’t know where to go from that last one. Or she does, rather, but somehow can’t.

How _does_ one ask one’s husband—a man one loves with everything one is, a man one respects and desires and has promised one’s heart to until death—for a divorce?

She doesn’t know. She’s been trying for weeks—no, months—and still hasn’t found an answer.

But she has a beginning. That’s something.

That’s important.

\---

Of course, in the end, it’s all for nothing. She barely gets past her fourth sentence before she breaks down, and what was always going to be a horrible conversation becomes worse by an order of magnitude as Grant’s first act is to hug her close.

“Shh,” he says, arms warm and solid around her, so familiar that she could cry—were she not crying already, that is. “I know, Jemma. It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” she disagrees thickly. “I don’t _want_ —I’m—I _love_ you, this isn’t what—”

Sentences five and nine and twelve and fourteen all try to come out at once and emerge in a hopeless jumble, and though Grant’s voice remains steady as he shushes her, his heart pounds like a jackhammer beneath her ear.

“I know,” he says again, hoarsely. “I love you, too. I don’t want to hurt you anymore.”

She wants to deny it, to reassure him, but she’s a terrible liar and the truth is that he _has_ hurt her. He’s hurt her terribly, repeatedly, endlessly, with his presence and absence both, and she can’t stand it any longer. She can’t stand the hurt he causes her, or the hurt she causes him by _being_ hurt.

It’s true, her first sentence. She simply _can’t_ do this any longer.

She tries to communicate this to him, tries to explain that it’s not that she doesn’t love him, that it’s not that she blames him, that it’s not that she doesn’t _want_ their marriage to work—

But she’s so overwhelmed, drowning in misery and guilt, and all she can do is say “I _can’t_ ,” over and over again as she sobs in his arms.

She should have allowed more time for preparation.

And perhaps he, too, could have used it, because in answer to her repetition, he offers some of his own.

“I know,” he says, again and again. “I know.”

He holds her tight and says _I know_ and presses kisses to her hair while she cries, and all the while his heart pounds a desperate rhythm against her cheek. He offers no reassurance, no apology—and no protest.

When she finally regains control of herself, hours or days later, when her tears finally run dry and the tide of misery has receded (only receded, not disappeared; she knows it will return, and soon), he cups her face in his hands and stares down at her with eyes that she can read perfectly, for the first time in what feels like years:

Despair and guilt and misery and heartbreak, and if those are a hint of tears of his own, she doesn’t want to know, because she simply wouldn’t be able to bear it.

“Is there any way I can talk you out of this?” he asks, and her stomach turns in on itself at the resignation in his voice.

“I’m sorry,” she says—whispers, really, because it’s all that she can manage. Shame claws at her lungs, leaving breathing impossible and speaking nearly so. “But no.”

He closes his eyes, just for a moment, and when he opens them again, they’ve returned to the blankness which has become so horribly familiar lately. Something inside of her cracks; she can’t read his eyes, but he can’t hide the muscle ticking in his jaw.

“Okay,” he says, and presses a gentle kiss to her forehead. “Okay, sweetheart.”

He tips his head down to rest his forehead against hers, hands falling away from her face to hold her by the hips instead, and her entire world narrows down to this: to the two of them, to the heat of him, the weight of his hands on her, the cotton of his shirt where her hands fist near his shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” she repeats, heartsick.

“Me too,” he says. His fingers flex on her hips and then, with a deep breath, he steps back, easing out of her space. “If this is what you need, I won’t fight it.”

Tears sting at her eyes once more, and she has to turn away from him for a moment. _Need_ , he says. If it’s what she _needs_. Not what she wants.

This is the last thing she wants, but it’s exactly what she needs. It’s what she _has_ to do in order to survive.

Is it better or worse, she wonders (and she does _not_ think the words _for better or for worse_ , nor of the words that came before or after), that he truly understands?

She turns back to him to find that he’s put more distance between them, a good three feet where before there were mere inches, and knows the answer.

It is so, so much worse.

\---

The legalities of their divorce are handled within SHIELD, of course, just as the legalities of their wedding were. It happens very fast; over the two months following their filed intent to divorce, they report to Legal seven times as ordered—thrice each separately and once together. Jemma doesn’t know what happens during Grant’s individual meetings, but hers consist mostly of trying to convince the frowning, sympathetic advisor she’s been assigned that Grant has been neither unfaithful nor violent.

And her advisor isn’t the only she needs to convince. Fitz already knows everything, of course, but there are other colleagues to be reassured, and friends and mentors and, worst of all, her parents.

(She cries for that last conversation—perhaps even more than she did during her conversation with Grant. Her parents have been happily married for nearly thirty years; confessing her failure in an area in which they’ve so wonderfully succeeded makes her feel young and foolish and so very, very small.)

(And guilty. There’s so much guilt in her she might choke on it, if she’s not careful.)

She says the words, “We’ve simply grown apart,” over and over, so many times to so many people that they become second nature, and she fears perhaps she’s begun to speak them in her sleep, as well. Not that there’s any way of knowing; Grant moved out of their apartment scant hours after she told him—or tried to tell him, rather—that she needed a divorce.

In any case, her advisor’s suspicions aside, the whole process is very easy. It’s almost painfully civil; when they are summoned together to Legal, they sit in front of an arbitrator with their respective advisors and see to a very amicable division of assets. There are a few tense moments—Grant wants to pay her alimony, and her refusal of it and his reaction to said refusal nearly devolve into a shouting match—but in the end, everything is settled quickly.

She signs the papers first: initials JSW or scrawls _Jemma Simmons-Ward_ as directed, and it’s only as she reaches the very last line that the arbitrator brings up something she’s only discussed with her advisor and has been hoping no one would mention.

“I’m sorry,” he says, checking his tablet. “I haven’t heard it addressed yet; Agent Simmons, will you need a Petition for Change of Name?”

Jemma keeps her gaze fixed on the form in front of her, politely pretending not to catch the whitening of Grant’s knuckles in her peripheral vision. She hasn’t made eye contact with him once, today; every time she does, an apology springs to her lips, and she fears she can’t voice it without crying ( _again_ ).

She doesn’t want to cry. Not here.

“No, thank you,” she says, focusing all of her concentration on making all of her _m_ s identical. “I’ll be keeping Grant’s name, for the moment.” She glances at the wall behind his head, close enough to give the appearance of looking at him. “Unless you have any objections?”

“No,” Grant says, voice rough. He clears his throat. “That’s fine.”

“Excellent,” she says, and slides the completed forms to the arbitrator. “That’s me done, then.”

She manages to keep her voice light and unaffected, but she doesn’t have the chance to celebrate that victory. The forms are passed along to Grant, and the resignation on his face as he accepts the pen his advisor offers him makes something cold and terrible unfold in her chest.

She meant to leave once she finished her part in this, but now that the moment has arrived, she can’t seem to move. She hears Grant’s advisor’s murmured instructions as though through a tunnel; they echo oddly in her ears as her eyes follow the motion of the pen over the page.

His left hand is splayed across the top of the form, keeping it still as he signs it. He’s still wearing his wedding ring, and the sight of it shreds her lungs to pieces. Suddenly, she can’t get enough oxygen.

This is really happening. This has really _happened_.

Grant passes the stack of forms back to the arbitrator, and just like that, they’re divorced.

To say that she loses time would be inaccurate. She’s perfectly aware of where she is and what she’s doing, hears the polite words she speaks as she shakes hands with the assorted SHIELD officials in the room and thanks them for their assistance and their time. She understands everything the arbitrator says about adjustment periods and absorbs the practiced spiel about the various post-divorce counseling options available to them.

She is wholly cognizant of her actions and the actions of the others in the room. She is not, however, involved in them at all. It’s as though she’s observing a play from a great distance, watching someone else walk through the niceties of this situation wearing her face. Everything she says and does happens automatically, with absolutely no conscious thought on her part.

She doesn’t feel at all herself.

“Would you like me to walk you out, Jemma?” her advisor asks, resting a hand on her shoulder.

“No,” she hears herself say. “Thank you, but that won’t be necessary.”

An exchange of pleasantries occurs without her input, and then her advisor is out the door, following the arbitrator and the other advisor. They’ve been speaking for hours, and Jemma has known her advisor for months, but she can’t remember their names at all.

She can’t move. She should leave, get home and have a lie down and (another) cry and perhaps a bottle of wine or two, but all she can do is stand where she is, holding on to the table and waiting for her body to feel like hers again.

“Jemma?”

Grant’s voice startles her back into her skin, and if not for her grip on the table, she might have fallen. As it is, her head is spinning awfully as she turns to face him.

“Yes?” she asks. She still can’t bring herself to meet his eyes; she directs her gaze instead to the buttons of his shirt. “Is everything all right?”

“I was gonna ask you the same question,” he says. His hands fist and then relax at his sides, an uncharacteristic tell. “You look kind of pale.”

“I’m fine,” she says. “Thank you.”

There’s a long, uncomfortable pause. Jemma looks down at the table, at her copies of the forms they’ve just filed, neatly stacked and ready to be taken home.

“Where are you staying?” she asks, before she even knows she means to. It’s not like a few moments ago, when someone else was speaking her words with her voice; it’s all her, simply speaking without thought. “I mean…have you been assigned new quarters?”

Grant shifts in place. “Uh, yeah. At the Hub.”

That—well. It’s only to be expected, of course; the Sandbox is meant for scientists, not specialists, and if they’re not married (they’re _not married_ ), then there’s no call for him to be quartered here. Still, it hurts.

That’s to be expected, too, really. _Everything_ hurts.

“I see,” she says, and Grant exhales slowly.

“Will you look at me, please?” he asks.

Tears burn at the back of her throat, and she swallows. It’s such a small thing he’s asking—such a tiny, insignificant thing—and she’s hurt him so much with this. She knows she has; she can see it in his every movement, hear it in his every breath.

He loves her just as much as she loves him, and this is killing them both. She, at least, has the comfort of knowing that it’s her own choice; Grant doesn’t even have that. He’s let this happen out of his love for her, let her lead them to this point with only the slightest argument—has made this as easy on her as possible, even though she could see him hurting every step of the way.

With that in mind, she can hardly deny his request. She forces her eyes up to meet his, dark and sad but still so gorgeous, and her heart clenches.

“I’m sorry,” she says, before she can stop herself. “I’m so sorry, Grant.”

He hisses in a breath and closes the distance between them in three strides, stopping just short of too close. (It wouldn’t have been too close before, but now that they’re not married— _they’re not married_ —she supposes the boundaries of personal space will need to be redrawn.)

“No.” One of his hands hovers in the air between them for a moment, as though he means to touch her, and then he lets it fall back to his side. “This isn’t your fault, sweetheart. It’s mine.”

The endearment hits her right in the solar plexus, knocking what little oxygen she’s managed to obtain right out of her.

“No,” she says, strangled. “No, it’s not—”

“It is,” he insists. “We both know that. All you’re doing is protecting yourself, and that wouldn’t be necessary if I were a better husband.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that. If he needed to be a better husband, surely she should’ve been a better _wife_ and given him the chance? She should’ve let him try to improve before taking this step, before simply—simply giving up and declaring it over.

…But she did try, didn’t she? A tiny voice inside contends that she did. They’ve been fracturing for years, and she’s given him every opportunity to make things right.

They’ve had this conversation repeatedly over the last two months, and each time, that tiny voice grows a little louder. Maybe someday she’ll be able to believe it, but for the moment, she just hasn’t the strength to go through this whole exchange again.

“I suppose we’ll have to agree to disagree on that,” she says.

The smile Grant gives her is so plainly forced that she aches with it. He makes his living pretending to feel things he doesn’t; that he can’t manage it now says more than anything else just how badly she’s hurt him.

“I guess so,” he says. He scrubs his palms against his jeans, then checks his watch. “I should go. Got a briefing at 1600.”

“You’re…being sent out?” she asks, incredulous. “ _Today_?”

She knows SHIELD can be demanding at times, but certainly the finalization of a divorce is enough to entitle one to a day off. Jemma herself has orders not to set foot in the lab for the rest of the week, at least. (Which is just as well; Fitz has been sent away, temporarily assigned to the Triskelion in the wake of his attempt to do Grant physical harm three weeks ago, and she’s not sure she could stand an empty lab on top of her empty apartment.)

“Oh, I…” He grimaces a little. “I volunteered.”

“Oh.”

That puts rather a different spin on things. She knows violence is his preferred method of dealing with intense emotion; perhaps she should have expected he would turn to it now.

“Well, um,” she swallows past the lump in her throat and then gives him her best smile. “Good luck, then. Stay safe.”

“I’ll do my best,” he promises.

She wishes she could believe that.

They stand there for a moment in painful, awkward silence, neither of them sure how to part. Whatever happens next—whether they ever see one another again or not—this is goodbye. They walked into this room as husband and wife, and they’re leaving it as nothing.

But this is ridiculous. Before they were anything else, they were friends, and it’s not like they don’t both know they’re still in love. There’s no point in pretending otherwise; it would be absurd to send him off with a handshake, as though they’re mere acquaintances.

So she gathers her courage and hugs him.

“Goodbye, Grant.”

He pauses slightly before returning the embrace, and when his arms do close around her, she can feel the stutter in his breathing. Her own is strained as well; even now, even having just hurt him so terribly, even having only just finished ending their marriage, she takes such comfort from him, and it _hurts_.

Surrounded by the warmth of his arms, some of the awful coldness in the hollow of her chest fades.  It feels like a cruel joke.

“Goodbye, Jemma,” he says, low and sad. His hand slides into her hair as he dips his head to press a kiss to the top of hers, and she has to close her eyes against the tears welling in them. “If you ever need anything…”

“I’ll call,” she says. “And the same goes for you, of course.”

“Of course,” he echoes, and squeezes her once, tightly, before stepping back. “I have to go.”

She clears her throat, but her voice is still rough when she says, “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” he says, and with one more painful smile, he’s gone.

And that’s how Jemma’s marriage ends: with a false smile and a horribly friendly goodbye.


End file.
